Osiris and Pagan Resurrection Myths: Assessing the Till-McFall Exchange
See Farrell Till's article The Pagan Origins of Resurrection and Mark McFall's (ITW) article OH-SIGH-RIS for context.
by Richard C. Carrier
Copyright 2002. The right to quote or reproduce this work in full is
granted to anyone who credits the author and does not use it for profit.
-:-
Mark McFall asked my opinion of an ongoing debate he has been having
with Farrell Till. As a degreed expert on ancient history, my assessment
of the most recent exchange in the Mar-May 2002 issue of In the Word is
that, overall, Till and McFall are both right and both wrong. Before I
discuss this, however, disclosure is appropriate: I am an atheist and
have also written an online essay on pagan parallels and ideas of
resurrection, the historical merit of the evidence for the reality of
Christ's resurrection generally, and the case for the Pauline notion of a
spiritual resurrection: see "Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story"
2000.
Everything I say below draws on what is presented in that essay
or on my own personal experience in ancient history. [Though do note warnings at that site that that essay is now obsolete and has been superseded by subsequent print publications.]
First of all, as their able arguments show, doubt can be thrown on
both cases: there is no certain answer known to us today regarding what
anyone really believed about Osiris in the time of Christ. This is all
the more so since the only sources cited by both challengers are either
ancient (preceding even Classical Greek literature) or very unreliable.
This is most damning in the case of Plutarch, who was a rabid Platonist
with an obvious and explicit disdain for popular religion. He is well
known for rewriting and distorting facts to suit his genteel Greek
sensibilities and his unabashedly Platonist dogmas, and he actually says
many times that he has dismissed or omitted much out of disgust with
popular notions. Yet Christianity arose from the illiterate masses, and
waited quite a long time before scholars of any note took interest in
it. Thus, Plutarch's views could be worlds away from anything Osiris
worshippers, or the earliest would-be Christians, may have known or
believed.[1] This source problem only compounds what is already evident
from the Till-McFall exchange: the evidence can legitimately be
interpreted in many different ways.
On the one hand, Till's case is overly repetitive and polemical in
tone (we don't really care what McFall's ulterior motives may be--they
are irrelevant to the issue in dispute). Likewise, he relies too much on
the notoriously unreliable opinions of Frazer (I would never trust
myself what that man wrote) and an anachronistic view of ancient
culture. He has also picked a relatively lame horse, since Osiris
worship remains little understood.
On the other hand, McFall makes four general mistakes of his own. I
will address McFall's errors first, then conclude with Till's. Number
one. McFall writes as though Till's (or any skeptic's) argument is that
"New Testament writers borrow[ed] the resurrection concept from myths."
That is an over simplification on two counts. On the one hand, whether Christians did get the idea from some
particular religion or religions is not something we can likely ever
know; rather, what is significant is that the idea was "in the air" and
thus not novel. A skeptic might ask why a God would enact a plan of
salvation that assembles syncretically the ideas of false religions
actively practiced at the time. Such a syncretic assembly is the
hallmark of human invention, not divine plan. On the other hand, it is quite easy (and has happened again and
again) for a religious movement to unconsciously adopt, and in the
process mold and transform, a popular notion in the surrounding culture.
Rather than conscious borrowing, the existence of potent ideas in the
broader culture will affect what people expect, what they believe to be
possible, and how they will interpret strange events or escape a
psychological crisis. The first Christians may have had no idea of the
influence of pagan ideas on their interpretation of the events
surrounding and following the death of their beloved leader.
Number two. McFall overplays just a bit the "x is not enough like y"
card. By finding differences between Christianity and other myths, like
that of Osiris, he claims there could therefore be no influence. That
does not follow. Every religion is unique. It is not therefore true. You
would struggle in vain to find the precedent for the Attis cult's
practice of self-castration and the carrying of trees all over Italy. People invent novel, even wildly strange religions all the
time. Appeals to popular hatred of the novel are also in vain, since
despite the almost universal disgust the Greeks and Romans felt toward
castrated men the Attis cult nonetheless flourished, even in the heart
of Italy itself. Likewise, the Attis cult's notion of a God dying and then being
resurrected with the agricultural cycle is obviously a borrowing from
the numerous agricultural-resurrection cults of the day, yet it is
entirely novel for the cause of death: castration. It would be quite
wrong to say, perhaps, "No other pagan gods died that way, so those
dying-and-rising gods are not parallels inspiring the Attis myth." That
is obviously not true. Thus, finding differences between Christ and
Osiris carries little weight. It still remains that a dying-and-rising
god motif exists in both cases and thus the Christian belief is not
entirely novel. It remains worth exploring just how novel it is, and
why, but we cannot dismiss obvious similarities simply because there are
differences.
When we revisit the issue of syncretism we see that while the most
popular pagan notions of divine and personal resurrection appear to be
metaphorical or to relate to events that are real but carried out in
some other sphere beyond that of earth, the Jews had already brought the
resurrection idea down to earth in a purely physical form. It is not
hard to see how a simple uniting of the two ideologies produces
Christianity: the ethereal resurrection of a single divine man combined
with the physical, mass resurrection eagerly expected by the Jews. It
makes too much sense to dismiss too easily.
Likewise, while McFall makes much of the fact that Biblical
resurrections other than that of Jesus are not a final conquest of
death, he misses two facts: first, that Jews already had the idea of a
conquest of death in the final resurrection of all Israel (it would be a
return to the paradise of Eden, free of death and disease and want, as
is clear throughout Philo, Josephus, and the Talmudic and Mishnaic
literature); and, second, that the most popular pagan salvation cults
already had the notion of a conquest over death in an individual
resurrection into a heavenly or otherworldly paradise in exchange for
faith, ethical conduct, and initiation into a ritual mystery.
Christianity, again, can easily be described as the amalgamation of both
views. Indeed, a skeptic can note that there is no particular reason either
for the deification of Jesus or for the rampant use of mystery religion
vocabulary in the Epistles, or for the adoption of a rebirthing
ceremony, apart from the fact that these ideas were already popular
among pagans. For instance, if Jesus were an ordinary man who was the
"first fruit" of the Jewish resurrection, that would indeed be a
remarkable innovation. But the Christians made him a divine man, thus
making his resurrection fall in line with pagan expectations of what was
possible and appropriate. That fits with a theory like Till's at least
as well as McFall's.
Though to his credit McFall did not use the tired argument that the
Jews would not unite their views with pagan notions, I would like to
head that falsehood off from the start: not only do we know for a fact
that Jews did just this (Philo's Platonic Judaism, the Jewish Orphics,
the appearance of the Persian flaming hell in Hellenistic Jewish
theology, etc.), we also know there were numerous Jewish sects each with
radically different ideas, each more or less accumulating ideas from
surrounding cultures, and to top it all off, Christianity began far more
successful among Gentiles and Hellenized Jews than among conservative
heartland Jews (as Paul's letters demonstrate). It is also worth
pointing out that McFall mistakenly assumes a netherworld was not
regarded as a real, material place located on earth (most ancient
cultures held such a belief, even while other beliefs gained
popularity), and he ignores the fact that Christians even as early as
Paul believed Jesus did indeed go to the netherworld before rising, so
the parallel of an Osiris raised in a netherworld looks a bit more like
early Christian belief than he lets on, despite the differences that
remain.
Number three. McFall goes off on a long tangent arguing there is
better evidence for a real resurrection of Jesus than for Osiris. This
is not entirely relevant here. No one, least of all skeptics, argues
that Osiris was really resurrected. We are not talking about what
happened, but what people believed, what ideas were considered viable,
popular, ripe for the taking, potent influences. Making a case that the
physical resurrection of Jesus actually happened is a wholly different
argument than whether the idea of such a resurrection was already alive
among pagans and pre-Christian Jews. Both in fact could be true, so even
if successful here (and I am not persuaded) McFall has not refuted
Till's primary point that the idea of such a resurrection could have
causes other than historical fact. McFall could grant that and still
argue that the evidence leads us to historical fact anyway.
Number four. Always beware of apologists who are not classicists.
McFall breaks this rule when he buys into Nash's inept anachronism of a
distinction between resurrection and resuscitation. No such distinction
existed in the conceptions of ancient peoples. Since there was no such
distinction then, you cannot use such a distinction as a wedge to argue
that one group would not get the idea of resurrection from another
group's idea of resuscitation, because both groups in those times would
have comprehended both concepts, and employed the same terminology for
both. Indeed, McFall is in an even worse position here than Till makes out.
For the original Christian words for "resurrection" are actually very
vague: anastasis and egeiromai, and their cognates, simply mean "rise
up, get up" and were hardly ever used to refer to returning from the
dead before the Christians used them in that sense. Instead, the usual
use of these words was for waking up from sleep or standing up from a
prone position.
Thus, the original Christian vocabulary was actually far closer in
basic meaning to Nash's idea of "resuscitation" than resurrection. The
fact that Christians had no trouble adding many layers of double meaning
onto such a concept only further proves they were ignorant of Nash's
distinctions. In contrast, Plutarch's words, which McFall himself cites for the
"resurrection of Osiris," are far more specific and potent: anabiôsis
means quite literally "back to life," leaving far less room for
ambiguity. It is hard to imagine how a spiritual resurrection could be
called "back" to "life," much less a passage to another world, for
neither is a return to anything previous (entailed by the prefix ana-),
and biosis is the antonym of nekrosis, "death," and those in Hades are
called the "dead" (nekroi) so it would not make much sense to refer to
someone in Hades as biotês (the "living"). So why does Plutarch use
this word of Osiris? That is a legitimate question.
Likewise, paliggenesis (palin, "back again," and genesis, "birth")
leaves little ambiguity: as "rebirth" it was a standard word for
regeneration, which refers to one's body (even Christians use it thus:
Matt.
Now to Till's blunders. First, he is a fish out of water when he asks the rhetorical question "why did
Isis go to such great lengths to find all of the scattered body
parts and reassemble them?" Any expert in ancient cultures would know
the answer to this: because the souls of the deceased could not find
rest, could not pass into the underworld, until their whole bodies were
properly buried. Greek tragedies are rife with the notion, as is Jewish
Talmudic law, even history: the Athenians actually executed their naval
commanders who did not try to retrieve the bodies of sailors lost at
sea. There is no need here of any connection with a resurrection motif.
Moreover, Till's citation of several sources used in connection with
funerals and mummification seems unenlightened by the cultural facts at
hand. He cites language directed at preservation, not resurrection, and
for a specific and well-known reason: the Egyptians (and, incidentally,
the Jews, as attested in early Judaic texts) believed that if the body
were disfigured by damage or decay, the soul, which was fond of
wandering, would be unable to recognize its abode and so would get lost.
This is why Egyptians made such heavy use of realistic statuary and
painted or engraved masks and sarcophagi, since it was felt that even
should the body rot, these items, by retaining the visage of the
deceased, would remain as markers for the wandering soul.
However, I join Till in his belief that Paul preached a spiritual
resurrection and I have gathered far more evidence for this than he has.
But McFall's response to this is still largely correct. We cannot
import contemporary ideas into ancient thinking. And the idea that souls
do not have mass, that souls are not "bodies" with location, made of a
material, was unusual in antiquity, unlike today. In fact, the common
idea of a massless, immaterial soul is largely a product of medieval
thought, though the idea already had a nascent place in Platonism and
certain pagan cults. Thus, it may well be that Paul and other early
Christians believed the resurrected Christ had a new "body," though now
made of incorruptible material--which could not be "molecules" as McFall
suggests, since those would be by definition earthly and therefore
subject to decay. Rather, it was certainly the pure homogenous element
of aether, the material of the heavens, well-known to all thinkers of
the day as the only indestructible, unchanging material in the universe.
This belief was almost certainly held by Paul, and would be compatible
with both the belief that the tomb was empty (i.e. Jesus' flesh
disintegrated altogether, and now he walked in an aetherial body) and
the belief that the body of Jesus remained in the tomb to decay while
the real Jesus assumed and walked in a new form (a concept for which
there were numerous precedents in Persian and Essene belief as well as
Platonic and Orphic spiritology). As Paul is silent on which belief the
Christians held, and as both are compatible with what he does say, we
cannot claim to have refuted either view from this material alone.
Finally, I am not sure I understand Till's longwinded focus on the
Osiris myth in the first place. This is easily the least persuasive
parallel with Christianity among extant religions of the day.[2] There are
far more convincing cases for a pagan belief in a physical resurrection.
Take Castor and Pollux (or Polydeuces). These two brothers, called the
Dioscuri, won a special deal from the gods: though both had died, only
one of them had to actually sit in Hades, while the other got to live
again on earth, and they exchanged places either every six months or
every other day. Massively popular as savior deities and protectors,
often "seen" physically appearing and acting in battles and other
crises, there is no way anyone, especially anyone who spoke much less
wrote Greek, would not have heard of these gods and their myth. This is
an indisputable case of an idea of physical resurrection on Earth, and
one that was ubiquitous in the time of Christ. This is all the more
important a parallel since there are signs that Mark deliberately
employed the Dioscuri typology in his Gospel (Dennis McDonald devotes a
whole chapter to this in his book The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of
Mark, 2000). Yes, differences remain, but its the similarities that
matter.
In another respect there is the story of Inanna, which included not
only a clearly genuine belief in her return to earth after death (and
subsequent rule over Sumeria), but her manner of death was identical to
that of Jesus: she was crucified (differences in procedure notwithstanding). This myth cycle, though very ancient,
was the direct ancestor to several forms of goddess worship extant in
the time of Jesus. In still another respect there is the story of
Zalmoxis in Herodotus, another clear case of belief in physical
resurrection (the Greek euhemerization of the Thracian religion he
describes would not make any plausible sense otherwise). And there are
many more parallels, showing a wide diversity of views about
resurrection arising in the very century that Christianity began. This
cannot be mere coincidence. It is clear that ancient peoples were
experimenting with many different concepts of resurrection, and the idea
was becoming popular, at the very time that one of these experiments,
Christianity, arose.
This does not entail that Jesus' resurrection was false. But it does
support any argument to that effect. There is as far as I have seen
nothing significant about Christianity that was novel: everything of
importance had precedents in other religions, pagan or Jewish, and can
easily be explained as a syncretic combining of numerous different ideas
into one. The combination was certainly novel and unique, as every
religion is, but not inexplicable. It may still be genuine divine truth
despite all this (and Christian apologists of the 2nd century and later
blamed pagan parallels like these on the Devil), but such a case is
still weakened when there are plausible human causes like this. This at
least deserves acknowledging, no matter what you conclude in the end.
-:-[1] Since writing this I collected abundant evidence to the contrary. Plutarch's discussion is probably correctly describing the teachings of the Osiris priesthood (even if not those of the rank-and-file lay believer; although he does describe those as well, and denounces them as inaccurate or vulgar). The evidence is now presented in On the Historicity of Jesus (2014).
[2] Since writing this I collected abundant evidence to the contrary. Osiris is a stronger parallel than I believed. The evidence is now presented in On the Historicity of Jesus (2014).
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου